


Sunrise

by Ione



Category: Daphne Du Maurier - Frenchman's Creek
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-27
Updated: 2009-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-05 08:03:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ione/pseuds/Ione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jay Tryfanstone (as did I) wanted a better ending to Frenchman's Creek . . . so here is my attempt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sunrise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jay Tryfanstone](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Jay+Tryfanstone).



The sun was sinking over London's west end, a sullen ball of red just below a marching rank of cloud, as the Countess of Castlemaine's

carriage clattered over the stones. She leaned forward, her face pressed to the carriage window.

Dona St. Columb relaxed against the cushions so the lady could lean across her. She breathed in the scent of citrus and musk rising from the duchess's clothes. Auburn curls that owed nothing to henna tickled Dona's nose, and then, with a sigh and a rustling of silks, Lady Barbara sat back. "There goes that odd little man they talk of."

Dona St. Columb plied her fan idly. "Which odd man would that be, then? There are a lot of them walking about Pall Mall."

"They call him Poops or Peeps, but that may be a make-name, like they do in the theatre. You know, Sir Ralph Roisterdoister, or Makepeace Quakercoat. They say he ruffles the maidservants. Harry must have talked of him—he's something at the navy yard."

"No, Harry did not." Dona's smile turned pensive when she thought of her late husband. She did not miss Harry, and sometimes she regretted how she could not miss him.

Yet she did not blame Sir Harry St. Columb for her own mistake, taking the lazy laughter in his eyes for wit. Many women had far worse a time of marriage than she had had—including their queen.

Lady Barbara tipped her head to one side. "You mourn him, your Sir Harry?"

Dona did not know what to say. Before Sir Harry went over to the continent, thinking that fighting for the king would be high fun, he'd poked about the navy yard with the idea of becoming a second Sir Francis Drake. But the motion of the deck not far from Portsmouth had put paid to that adventure, and so he'd joined the volunteers following the Duke of York to take the sword against the Dutch. It seemed so unfair that a man who had no real enemies, who had never done anyone the least harm, would be among the first to die at Lowestoft. And not of a cavalry charge, or a bursting of artillery, but of the bloody flux, which he _would_ try to cure with canary, after being cupped.

"He died the way he wanted to," she said finally. "With his boots on. His Grace of York promised me it was a quick death. Harry looked more surprised than anything, and protested he'd only begun his sixth bottle."

"Sixth!" Lady Barbara touched her fan to Dona's wrist and leaned back, laughing. "Oh, forgive me, my dear. But 'struth, it's a merry world we live in—I have a quiver of royal brats, and who knows what will become of 'em, while _she_\--" (Catherine of Braganza was invariably referred to as _she_)"—daily prays for my death, yet her brats die as soon as she pushes 'em out."

"She may yet have her son," Dona said mildly, feeling a surge of sympathy for the neglected queen.

"Heigh ho, then out I go," Lady Barbara said, her fine brows aslant as she flirted her fan out the window to a set of strolling noblemen.

Dona just caught Rochester's indolent gaze before the coach rolled past the beribboned and curled courtly peacocks on the strut. Rochester's smile was exactly the same as it had been in the Swan in those hazy days before Dona's secret life: he believed himself in the secret. But Dona never regarded those days supping cheek by jowl with the women of he streets, desire rising off the men like heat from the stones of the street in summer.

She knew that all Harry's former friends—those still alive, and she wondered how long that would be said of Rochester—were puzzled by her reclusive life as a widow.

Another band of strutting peacocks, circling around the one with long dark curls and the heavy Stuart eyes. Here was the object of Lady Barbara's restless gaze.

Lady Barbara did not have to knock on the ceiling to cause the coach to halt. The vehicle rolled to a stop, and the liveried man sprang to the door as the noblemen deferred, leaving the field clear for the king. His appreciative gaze rested on them: Lady Barbara's opulent beauty paired with the slight, elusive grace of Lady St. Columb, sober in her widow's weeds.

Charles Stuart, King of England, knew that few of his court ladies liked the notorious daughter of the infamous Villiers family, but Sir Harry's wife, so tricky when they were younger, was her friend. Dona St. Columb was every woman's friend, it seemed. He had asked why, late one evening at a masquerade, when Sir Harry was snoring on the table, his cheek resting in his own vomit, and his wig askew, as the rest of them laughed insensately at Wilmot's filthy verses. He'd caught her alone between the guttering candles, where shadows shrouded those who wished not to be seen, and his anticipation was about to take wing until she said in French, _Because, Sire, we are all sisters under the sheets_. He still did not quite know what she had meant by that. But as the queen had just miscarried not a day earlier, he had not dared to ask.

And so he rewarded her deep curtsey with a nod of respect. Then he took a step toward the coach, and once again she seemed to read his mind, for she turned to Churchill and Grammont, two of the most notorious of Charles' rakes, and said sweetly, "May I trust to you gentlemen for your protection?"

They closed around her, leaving the king to climb into the coach, and pull the curtains. Dona tripped along between her swains, well knowing that to trust one rake was to risk annoyance, but two? They would watch one another—as well as every other man within view—and so she would arrive home as safe as a nun.  


* * *

  
Lady St. Columb's quiet—more to the point, ungrasping—generosity lingered long enough in the king's mind to bestir him in her favor some months later, when spring rains chased away the worst of winter's smells in the city, as the sawing and hammering and creaking trundle of carts signified the season of new building. All around were the signs of a new London, laid out with eye-pleasing symmetry and reason.

There was still no sign of a prince, but the king had hopes; he certainly was able to father sons enough.

And so when the French embassy returned after a winter's hiatus with new faces among the delegation, and one of those delegates made a modest request of the king, the king granted it.

Dona St. Columb, attending on the queen with the rest of the court ladies, was fetched by a young page. Wondering, she followed the little boy, who bounded importantly along the palace halls to one of the private anterooms where the king often kept visitors of some import. Who could the Chevalier de Perigord possibly be, and what had he to do with Lady St. Columb? Unless it might be something about Harry's personal effects, which the Duke of York had reported missing—happened all too often in a military camp.

Questions fled when a servant opened the door at her approach. She had just a moment to recognize the small, thin, pale-faced man with the button mouth, now wearing a respectable livery with the head of a raptorish wolf worked into it. Then she was in the arms of the man she had loved most truly.

He kissed her, and kissed her again, until she broke away, breathless and laughing, the kisses tasting of the salt of tears.

It really was he—her own pirate, whose name she'd learnt the day before she had said farewell to him for ever: Jean-Benoit Aubery.

"Chevalier de Perigord?"

His voice was light, and charming, warm as she had remembered. "My brother died in Spain," he said with an air of apology. "The family expected me to take his responsibilities. What is a sober-living former pirate to do?"

She laughed unsteadily. "What indeed?"

He put his head to one side, his manner sobering. "My I express my condolences?"

"Harry died as he wanted—young, and on adventure," she said. "And he left me well to pass."

"And so?" he asked.

She realized he was still holding her hands. She dashed her wet cheek against the stiff embroidery on the shoulder of her courtly widow's gown, but it just smeared the tears. "And so?"

"Once you gave me an answer. Do you remember?"

"I remember every word you ever spoke to me," she said.

He laughed without sound. "And our wager? Do you remember that?"

"I still have the lock from the wig. No one can guess its import. My earrings?"

"In a cask carved over with sea birds, locked in my escritoire," he said, and drew her further into the room, near the window, which overlooked the street. "Your king gave me permission to address you. So behold me! I ask for your answer. Is it still the same?"

She closed her eyes, drawing a breath to still the thunder of her heart in her ears. Then she opened them again, because she must drink in the sight of him, to add to her precious memories. "How can it change? My memories are so perfect. And while I ceased to be the sulky Lady St. Columb that you once despised—"

"Never. Never."

"You did. But no more than did I. She is gone, leaving in her place a more temperate woman,who cherishes perfect memories. Because she knows—as we both know—that relations are seldom perfect for very long. I would not become the woman who demands of you that house of reeds."

He dashed his hand against the wainscoting. "You could demand of me anything you like. Do you not see? How much more joy I would have in making you a house of reeds than in a life of stealing wigs and raiding the strong boxes of fat lords, whatever language they speak."

"But I will grow old," she said. "And ugly. I see it in the women around me, and perhaps they see it in me, too."

"You perceive the gray at my temples?"

"I do, but . . ."

"Is it ugly?"

"No." She leaned forward to kiss his temple, her lips lingering on the vein that beat just below the surface of his skin.

"You perceive the lines beside my beak of a nose?"

"Yes, but . . ."

"Are they ugly?"

"No. Nothing of you could be ugly," she declared with ringing conviction, because it was so: her passion was just as strong as it had been during the days when she was a laughing cabin boy, with tangled hair and wearing only a coarse shirt over boy's breeches, lying by the side of the lake.

"Do you see?" he asked again. "It is the same for me. Your house of reeds would become my house of reeds. Age would accrue grace if it happened by your side."

She turned around. She had resigned herself to a life without love, but she had had more than most. She had only to look around her: not even kings were exempt from worry, betrayal, the secrets lives that seemed inevitable if one must pay lip service to the rules. "You said once," she began very slowly. "That the world had gone amiss. That men forgot how to live and to love and to be happy. Is that not still true? I see the truth of it all around me."

"How much of our truth is made by ourselves?" he returned. "When I was younger, I escaped the rules made by others. Now, perhaps, I understand that I must make my own rules."

"So there are rules to love?"

He gestured, fingers flitting upward like a bird taking wing. "Are there? Here is one to test. If love comes before conversation, then it is not love, but lust. Lust is a conflagration. When it burns out, it leaves nothing. When conversation comes before love . . . the flame burns as true as friendship."

"Friendship," she repeated. "Like that between a cabin boy and a pirate?"

"Exactly that."

She turned away from the window, and studied his dear face. "We did make our own rules, did we not?"

"We could spend our life together making our rules, and living them."

"In England? Or in France? With James and Henrietta? And if there is another little Aubery?"

"We teach them to make their own rules, too. And if they teach their sons and daughters, and they teach their sons and daughters, who knows?

What was amiss might be put right again. Let the flame burn true," he said, taking her hands.

"As true as the sunrise." She smiled. "As true as the sun."


End file.
